Boston Globe - Clark Derbes

Clark Derbes - New Work

Many artists push 2-D pieces toward 3-D. Derbes goes the other way with his wood sculptures, which narrow, angle, and broaden to skew perspective and suggest flatness, an effect intensified by busy, colorful grids.

-Cate McQuaid

Boston Glove Reviews Danny Lyon and Richard Ross

Copyright: Danny Lyon, Magnum, Conversations with the Dead

LINCOLN — A grim irony shadows the 25 black-and-white photographs in “Danny Lyon: Conversations With the Dead.” The show runs through June 18 at the Clark Gallery, as does “Richard Ross: Juvenile in Justice.” If it seems odd to find exhibitions of prison photographs in the sylvan western suburbs, consider that MCI-Concord is less than 7 miles from the gallery.

Lyon’s best-known pictures, from his 1968 book, “The Bikeriders,” evoke that state of mind in which American space intersects with American possibility. For Lyon’s motorcyclists, escape and openness are only a kick-start away. Escape is not an option for the Texas inmates Lyon recorded over the course of 14 months documenting the Texas Department of Corrections during the late ’60s for his 1971 book, “Conversations With the Dead.” As for openness, it’s there, all right, but at dire cost, for those on outdoor work gangs.

Copyright: Danny Lyon, Magnum, Conversations with the Dead

It’s a parallel society that Lyon shows, with some 12,500 residents — and that’s not counting prison guards and other law-enforcement personnel. In that society, people live and eat and work, as they do on the outside. It’s just that that living and eating and working are punitively circumscribed and so much harsher. You don’t find electric chairs on the outside. The soft, even sweet expression on a guard’s face in the background of Lyon’s photograph of the apparatus simply underscores the chair’s awful purpose.

Copyright: Danny Lyon, Magnum, Conversations with the Dead

Lyon, who has a major retrospective opening next month at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, manages to bring together past and present. An image of prisoners picking cotton could be from the antebellum South.

Copyright: Danny Lyon, Magnum, Conversations with the Dead

The sight of guards on horseback and wearing 10-gallon hats summon up the Wild West.

Copyright: Danny Lyon, Magnum, Conversations with the Dead

Not that Lyon could know it then, but he even offers a glimpse of a surveilled future, as prisoners pass before a bank of closed-circuit monitors.

Copyright: Danny Lyon, Magnum, Conversations with the Dead

Past and present coexist within a single frame when a crane hoists up guards’ revolvers after they’ve brought back a work crew. Shot from above, the sight is jarringly surreal: black guns, white-garbed prisoners, a pickup truck, a pair of horses.

Copyright: Danny Lyon, Magnum, Conversations with the Dead

The 22 photographs from Richard Ross’s “Juvenile in Justice” series feel more immediate than Lyon’s pictures. They’re less distant in time, shot between 2007 and 2015. They’re in color. They’re larger, 24 inches by 38 inches (or vice versa), as opposed to 11 inches by 14 inches (or vice versa). They’re unframed and unmatted, pinned to the wall. They’re not restricted to a single state. There are images from California, Indiana, Mississippi, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Wisconsin, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and, yes, Texas.

Maybe that immediacy comes most from the knowledge that the people confined within these walls are little more than children. Some are children, as young as 10. D.P., whose eyes stare out from behind a slit in a lavender-colored door in the King County Youth Service Center, in Seattle, is 16. Already he has what Marines call “the thousand-yard stare.”

The most powerful pictures show isolation rooms. Most of them have as sole amenities, if that is the right word, a fluorescent light overhead and a drain in the floor.

There’s something almost medieval in their grim blankness, though not as medieval looking as the sets of handcuffs attached to a Los Angeles police booking bench. In neither instance does Ross include any people. The images would surely be unendurable otherwise.

BOSTON GLOBE Reviews AVNER SHER

Avner Sher: Scratching the Surface

In “Life Is Just a Game (after Benigni),” rows of serpents are inhabited by railcars, suggesting the Holocaust’s human cargo shipped to concentration camps.

Israeli artist and architect Avner Sher scratches, scorches, and gouges the surfaces of used corkboards in his show at Clark Gallery. They read like palimpsests, embedded with messages, covered over and eroded. His scratched imagery often grapples with power. Whether that power is political, parental, or the wrath of an unpredictable god is left to the viewer to reckon.

Tiny troopers frequently show up in the shadow of looming figures. In “The Queen,” Sher fills his surface with an eight-winged insect. Rows of miniscule insects cross the queen’s body and set up in soldierly rows at her tail. On its face, this could be a metaphoric portrayal of the female/male dynamic among certain insects. The queen rules; male drones serve her.

“The Feast” takes us down a dark road. The head of a multi-eyed crocodile, mouth open, looms over zig-zagging tunnels below – the critter’s saw-toothed mouth and gullet. Fish parade down the tunnels to their end. In “Life Is Just a Game (after Benigni),” rows of serpents are inhabited by railcars, suggesting the Holocaust’s human cargo shipped to concentration camps.

Sher’s questions about justice and clout read as age-old allegories, written on worn out templates, to which there have never been answers.

Payne & DiRado reviewed in Boston Globe

Boston Globe Reviews Jerry Beck

Overflowing show

Jerry Beck, dreamer, iconoclast, community organizer, and artist, has been in the area for years — first in Boston, then in Lowell, now in Fitchburg — making art and supporting artists. His overflowing show “Jerry Beck: RPM (Revolutions Per Minute)” at Clark Gallery touches on many of his favorite themes — masculinity, popular culture, dreams, and reveries.

With his shamanistic bent and the fount of the mythic unconscious as his source comes a conviction that everything that arises must have meaning, and so we are presented with scores of works, some of which are merely unresolved flights of fancy. Others, though, really stick their landings.

“The Captain’s Jacket,” for instance, a gorgeous black coat encrusted with darkly gleaming black shells, emanates strength and foreboding. It would fit well on Captain Ahab. “Dear Merry-Go-Round,” a mixed-media piece on paper, depicts a maniacally grinning crescent moon seeming to inflate within the circle of a Ferris wheel populated with drawings and photos of people, including Beck himself. It’s harrowing and funny, sharpened by the text that runs along its borders. “Oy vey, art,” it reads at the top.

But “Off the Road,” a wall-length collage of drawings and typewritten text, meanders obscurely, without accumulating much meaning. And “Six Shooter,” a giant, wall-mounted gun sculpture made of cork and wood, while imposing — as any huge gun would be — is nothing new, either in this artist’s oeuvre or in a world saturated with images of guns.

“RPM” spins its wheels a little too often. Even though an aesthetic of “too much” fits Beck’s avidity, this show could have used some editing.

Boston Globe Reviews Freed and Rainier Exibit

Cynthia Greig by My Modern Met

In her series Representations, photographer Cynthia Greig whitewashes mundane objects and traces the edges and details with charcoal. Things like a toaster, fruit, bottles, and books are all given this painterly touch and photographed against a white background. When devoid of environment and context, an pretty commonplace transformation happens, and the three-dimensional still lifes take on the appearance of simple charcoal drawings. They might look as though they’ve been Photoshopped, but Greig insists this is not the case.

In an artist statement, she calls the series an homage to photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot and his book, The Pencil of Nature. Published in 1844, Fox Talbot demonstrated all of the different ways photography could be used, as back then it was a new form of art. According to the Glasgow University Library, “Fox Talbot spent years trying perfect the process of calotypes so he could creatively interpret and reveal the truth or 'reality' of his surroundings.”

Much like Fox Talbot’s work, Greig says that Representations "explores the concept of photographic truth and its correspondence to perceived reality.” By painting objects white, she creates a cognitive dissonance for the viewer. Our past experiences tell us that a toaster should be shiny, an apple should be red, and french fries should be yellow. But, with simply paint and charcoal, she plays with our understanding of what is real and what is fake from a medium that is meant to capture reality.

Cynthia Greig by Beautiful/ Decay

For a list of all images by Cynthia available at Clark Gallery, Click Here

For Cynthia Greig‘s project, “Representations,” the artist whitewashes objects with ordinary white house paint before using charcoal to outline the items, then photographing the transformed objects against a white background. The effect renders the image as two-dimensional, appearing to be digitally manipulated or hand-drawn. The objects used, now in black and white, appear more iconic and symbolic than they would appear unaltered. In her artist statement, Greig explains that her work is an homage toWilliam Henry Fox Talbot and his treatise, “The Pencil of Nature.” Greig’s photographs ask observers to consider the truth of photography by challenging our perception of the reality of common objects.

“I’m interested in how we learn to see, identify and remember, and the role images play in the codification of perceptual and mnemonic experience. By denying certain aesthetic expectations and assumptions, Representations intends to interrupt a more conventional, passive viewing experience, and provoke the viewer into seeing a photograph as if for the first time.” (via my modern met)

Still Life Lives at Fitchburg Art Museum

Clark Gallery is honored to announce paintings by Janet Rickus, trompe l’oeil ceramic sculptures by David Furman, and photographs by Thomas Birtwistle and Cynthia Greig are featured in Still Life Lives at the Fitchburg Art Museum. The edxhibition runs through mid-January, 2014.

Richard Barnes and NBC News

Boston Globe Reviews Linda Connor

Boston Globe Reviews Aponovich 52

Paul Bowen in New England Home

Clark Gallery is pleased to announce the stunning work of Paul Bowen is the subject of a feature article in New England Home. Long boards and splinters of wood scavenged along the shores of Cape Cod and rivers of Vermont compose the abstract sculptures of Paul Bowen. A strong sense of geometry and form pervade his recent works. Circles, squares, cones, and wedges are formed with found wood from ships, beach shacks, and barrels, sometimes with tar or rusted scraps of metaldotting the surfaces. Traditional joinery techniques and found butterfly joints pull disparate elements together.

Paul's work is represented in numerous collections including: the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Walker Art Center, Fogg Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. He has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Jerry Beck Art and Science

Clark Gallery is honored to announce artist Jerry Beck has organized the Fitchburg Art Museum's Tales from a Test Tube, an art and science exhibition presented at the Warner Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry 100 Research Drive, Wilmington, MA from April 21 through July 27. All are welcome to attend a celebratory reception on April 21, from 1:00 - 4:00pm.

Tales from a Test Tube marks the first-ever collaboration between the Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg State University, and The Warner Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry and Beyond Benign.

Boston Globe Review: Awalt & Palmer

Morbid Curiosity in Chicago

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the photographs of Dana Salvo are included in Morbid Curiousity: The Richard Harris Collection at the Chicago Cultural Center. This groundbreaking exhibition showcases over one thousand artworks and other artifacts from the personal collection of Chicago-based collector Richard Harris. Amassed over several decades, Harris’s collection explores the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years, and includes works by some of the greatest artists of our time.

Eric Gottesman and The deCordova Biennial

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the work of Eric Gottesman is included in The 2012 deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museumfrom January 22 - April 22. Curated by Dina Deitsch and Judi Rotenberg the exhibition features 23 artists providing an up to the moment survey of important work being created in the region.

Eric has been the recipient of a number of important fellowships and grants including: a 2011 Apex Art Franchise Award, a 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellowship for work in the Middle East, a 2009 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, a 2008-2009 Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship, and he was the 2009 recipient of the esteemed Artadia Award. His first monograph Sudden Flowers: May the Finest in the World Always Accompany You! will soon be published by Umbrage Editions in 2012.

Eric will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Clark Gallery in April, 2012, and we have an excellent selection of his images in our inventory.

David Palmer NEWS

Clark Gallery is pleased to announce the stunning work of David Palmer, a SFMA alum, is featured on the cover of the recent issue of ELLE DECOR ESPANA. ELLE editors photographed the home of Bea Deza, Founder of the fashion brand SISTER JANE.

Bea's trademark motto is "Find your magic and run away from complacency." With David's painting central to Bea's domestic vernacular, this fashion designer walks the talk. Installed above a Louis XVI style sofa, David's bold, undulating, swooping and knotting single stroke painting gives the space a magical sense of life.

To see more of David's work please visit: http://www.clarkgallery.com/artists/david-palmer.

BOSTON GLOBE REVIEW: SMALDONE AND VEVERS

Clark Gallery is honored to announce our current exhibitions: Jane Smaldone: New Paintings; and Tabitha Vevers: The Art of Survival have been reviewed. Please click HERE for a link to Cate McQuaid's review in the Boston Globe. For a preview of images please click HERE.

Painters Jane Smaldone and Tabitha Vevers swim in surrealistic waters in their shows at Clark Gallery. Their dreamlike and moodily bizarre imagery is underscored by art historical references that reach further back than the 20th-century movement that spawned Salvadoe Dali and Man Ray.

In Vevers' work, the gold leaf and stylized figuration of pre-Renaissance painting collides with Japanese erotic prints from the early 19th century.Throw in a 20th-century comic book turn and a 21st-century alarm about environmental conditions, and you’ve got her cocktail - seductive, but with teeth.

Maybe claws would be the better metaphor, because Vevers regularly populates her paintings with giant lobsters who couple with women, like the octopus in Hokusai’s 1814 woodcut “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.’’ In “Shiva (Exodus)’’ a woman wearing only a bra emblazoned with fish faces rides the crustacean away from an iceberg studded with smokestacks. The gold-leaf sky gives the painting a jewel-like quality, but also makes it eerie and threatening.

That gold sky appears in many of Vevers’s works, which blend playful erotic metaphors with dark intimations of mutation and disaster. “Bananaman (To the Rescue)" shows a hero hurtling like Superman through just such a sky. The lower half of his body is a banana past its prime, and the hero’s face, under his blue hair, is filled with sadness. These scenes appear hopeless, but for their erotic charge and a current of tenderness in the characters.

Smaldone’s recipe includes folk art and Chinese landscape painting. Her weighty floral still lifes stand before backdrops of willowy Asian landscapes and shimmering, lacy patterns. Some of the flowers have human eyes, staring out placidly. This animates them; what would have been a demure but exquisite flower arrangement, as in “Still Life With Compassionate Flower,’’ now seems to regard you thoughtfully - and that’s unnerving.

For years, Smaldone has been painting her daughter, Isabel, now in her mid-teens. Where Isabel appears here, she looks away from the viewer. “Portrait of a Girl With Lace Curtains and Butterflies’’ has her seated against a smoldering red background of what looks like stenciled lace, full of texture and femininity and suggesting obscuring veils. Isabel looks to the right, but the radiant flowers in the vase beside her gaze out at us. They are the girl’s guardians. Flowers have always had the power to seduce, but Smaldone gives them the power to apprise. - Cate McQuaid

For more on the show, please click HERE to see the recent notice in the online art blog Phantasmaphile

Aponovich featured on Joyce's Choices

Clark Gallery is delighted to announce James Aponovich's unprecedented marathon of completing one painting each week for 52 Weeks has been featured in Joyce Kulhawik's online column Joyce's Choices, please click HERE to read the post.

RUTH & JIM BAUER THE BLUE FLOWER

David Palmer & DESIGN New England

Clark Gallery is pleased to announce the stunning work of David Palmer, an esteemed SMFA alum, is featured in the September -October issue of DESIGN New England. The caption reads: "The eye-catching abstract painting by David Palmer in the informal eating area reflects off the mirror-like black granite countertop in the adjoining kitchen..."

Installed in an historic, stately, century-old Back Bay Brownstone, David's bold, undulating, swooping and knotting single stroke painting over a pristine white ground gives the space a magical sense of life.

Eric Gottesman News

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the work of Eric Gottesman is the subject of an exhibition at REAL ART WAYS. The title of the exhibition is Tinsae, an installation based on his decade-long photographic conversation with Tinsae Muluneh – a boy living in a neighborhood in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The exhibition has been reviewed by the Hartford Courant. Click on WNPR to listen to an interview with Eric on NPR.

Eric's KICKSTARTER campaign has 15 days remaining for those interested in bringing his project SUDDEN FLOWERS: MAY THE FINEST IN THE WORLD ALWAYS ACCOMPANY YOU to publication. After eleven years of work, Eric intends to publish a book of photographs and texts he has produced with 24 children in one neighborhood in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. in 1999, Eric began working with six children living together in Addis Ababa whose parents had died of HIV/AIDS. Eric asked them to work with him to portray their own lives through photography. The children agreed to collaborate on the condition that their work be used to help other children like themselves. Soon after, the children formed the collective "Sudden Flowers," a collective dedicated to making art and films about the impact of HIV/AIDS and showing them to audiences around Ethiopia and around the world.

Tabitha Vevers

Tabitha's intimate and mysterious works are iconic and devotional, with imagery that is often beautiful, sexually charged and provocative. Gold leaf, exquisite color, and meticulously rendered figures enhance the emotional intensity of the work.

Vevers ...jewel-like paintings are laced with references to Illuminated manuscripts, the 12th Century practice of painting shells, Kai-awase, Mexican Ex-Votos, Pre-Renaissance Italian paintings, Irish Folklore, Scrimshaw, and Miniatures, and are executed on a wide array of materials including ivorine, vellum, tin, and found clam, oyster or scallop shells. Her stunning narrative paintings of fantastic allegory and mythology explore themes surrounding women, sexuality, and complex social and political issues.

Vevers work was recently the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Her work hasbeen featured in exhibitions at Yale University, Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, and in galleries in New York, Philadelphia, California, Germany, and Ireland. A graduate of Yale University and student at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, she was recognized by the International Association of Art Critics for her 2007 exhibition, Distant Shores, and has received grants from the George & Helen Segal Foundation, University of Rhode Island, and Fine Arts Work Center.

Clark Gallery is delighted to announce receiving BOSTON magazine's award of excellence as BEST OF BOSTON 2011.

On your next visit please consider combining food for the soul with food for the body by dining next door at the AKA Bistro, a BEST OF BOSTON 2011 awardee as best bistro!

Please note our August Hours: 10:00am until 9:00pm on Friday and Saturday as well as Sunday from 11:00 till 3:00pm. During the week we are performing our annual inventory and are open by chance and appointment.

Picture This: An Exhibition All About Books

Most writers I know love books. That’s stating the obvious, I know, but I’m talking about more than reading here. We love the physicality of a book, the weight in our hands, the smoothness of the cover, the smell...Saturday June 11th was the opening date of Picture Books, a two-month exhibition at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Massachusetts. In this post, BTM offers a glimpse of some of the 50 works of art in the show, and talks with gallerist and artist Dana Salvo who curated the show along with his wife, the artist Dawn Southworth.

Beyond The Margins is…. A blog, created by a dozen writers, is sounding board, offering a a daily dose of insight into all matters pertaining to making and writing books, and the business of publishing.

PICTURE BOOKS is a group exhibition featuring work in all media that pictures, or, references a book within the composition, or, is a book of some kind. Featured in the PICTUREBOOKS are paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures by nearly thirty artists from across the country.

Five of today’s most influential fine arts photography pundits discuss and debate the issues inherent in building a photography collection. The dialogue will be valuable to collectors of all levels whether they collect photographs because the images speak to their heart, their bank account, or both. Attendees will gain insight on what, where, and how best to buy, conserve, and display a collection. Over the last several years, the fine arts photography market has gone through a period of significant change and these well respected industry authorities will share their knowledge on how best to take advantage of these changes. This is a very rare opportunity for collectors to hear firsthand about the most important aspects inherent in building a successful photography collection.

Moderator Bio:

Jim Fitts has been a fine arts photography teacher, lecturer, curator, and photographer for over 30 years. He is an avid collector of fine arts photography with a focus on 20th century and contemporary American photographs.

Jim recently held the position of Executive Director of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University. The PRC is considered one of the countries premier fine arts photography organizations, presenting numerous lectures, exhibitions and networking events. Jim was also a teacher at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University where he taught portfolio development.

Jim has curated three photography exhibitions for the PRC/MIT Gallery. He has served as a reviewer for the 2009 PhotolucidaFotoFest portfolio reviews. He has also served as portfolio reviewer for the New England Portfolio Reviews and the Savannah College of Art and Design reviews. He has curated the SSAC Photography Now exhibition as well as serving twice as a juror for their member exhibition. In early 2011, he co-curated Instant Connections, an exhibition of photographs by photographers who use Polaroid technology in the creation of their work. portfolio reviews and the 2010

Jim Fitts has had an award-winning career in advertising, design and corporate identity. He held the position of Executive Creative Director at Avenue, Inc. in Chicago and Creative Director at HHCC in Boston and in Europe. Jim was Creative Director for Monster.com and a partner at ClarkeGowardFitts.

His personal work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2010 Jim’s recent work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Yamawaki Gallery at Lasell College.

Panelist Bios:

Barbara Hitchcock, former Cultural Affairs director, joined Polaroid Corporation in the 1970s in a research and development capacity. In 1978 Hitchcock joined Polaroid's international division publicity department where she frequently appeared as a Polaroid spokesperson on national and international television/radio broadcasts.

Since 1982, Hitchcock was responsible for the strategic marketing communications and program planning, development and execution of Polaroid's cultural activities. She acquired fine art photographs for Polaroid, managed its multi-million dollar art collections and its traveling exhibitions. She has been the curator of numerous exhibitions and has authored essays for many publications, most recently Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani 1978 – 2008; Private Views: Barbara Crane; Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings; The Polaroid Book; and Emerging Bodies: Nudes from the Polaroid Collection.

Hitchcock has served as a juror for several non-profit galleries, for ASMP of New England and for the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 2006, the Griffin Museum of Photography presented its Focus Award to Hitchcock for her critical contributions to the promotion of photography as a fine art. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to photography from the Photographic Resource Center in 2010.

Phillip Prodger is Curator and head of the department of photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. With around 850,000 objects dating to the year of photography's invention in 1839, the museum maintains one of the oldest and largest collections in the country. Prodger received a Ph.d. in history of art from Cambridge University and has worked at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. Recent book projects include Ernst Haas: Color Correction; Hoppe Portraits, Society, Studio and Street; and the forthcoming Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism.

Gary Leopold is the President and CEO of ISM, a Boston based marketing firm that specializes in problem solving for premier brands in the travel industry. Through the years he and his company have worked with such market leaders as Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, American Express, Emirates, Harley-Davidson, The United Nations Foundation, The Bahamas and Hong Kong. Prior to ISM, Gary served as the Director of Public Relations for Sonesta Hotels which is where he cultivated a love for art and begin his own collection (helped along by Sonesta’s annual Christmas print program). Since then Gary has amassed a collection of photographs that has now overrun two houses and his offices and includes images ranging from Aaron Siskind and Eugene W. Smith, to Nan Goldin and Mathew Pillsbury. Gary is on the Board of Directors of the Photographic Resource Center at BU and serves as the President of the Magnet Global Network, a consortia of 40 independent marketing firms located around the world.

Dana Salvo is both a gallerist and artist. He is the co-owner of Clark Gallery, one of New England's leading art galleries and a member of the Boston Art Dealers Association. The gallery exhibits contemporary art in all media by emerging, mid-career and established artists from the Northeast and nationally.

In addition, Salvo is an artist whose photographs are represented in numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Art Museum, San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Addison Gallery of American Art. His work is the subject of a monograph, published by Thames and Hudson, entitled Home Altars of Mexico. He has been the recipient of two awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and has twice received the Fulbright Scholar Award. He has also received grants from the Lila Wallace Fund; the Asian Cultural Council; the Massachusetts Cultural Council; the Berkshire Taconic Foundation's Artist Resource Trust; the LEF Foundation; and several other awards which assist artists in mid-career. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States.

Bruce Barry writes on clay. Through a combination of wheel throwing and hand forming, Barry creates ceramic vessels that become the surface for his transcription of free-flowing thought. Titled: Journal Entries, Barry records his thoughts, observations and events on the vessel surface in small, tightly knit script. From top to bottom the script flows, providing texture and decorative pattern to the otherwise smooth vessels. A graduate of Bates College, Barry currently teaches at Museum School at The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. His sculpture has been featured in exhibitions at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Clark Gallery, The Fuller Craft Museum, Milton Academy and others.

With this collaborative effort, we hope to create a meditative and engaging outdoor space for the community to celebrate and contemplate contemporary sculpture being created in New England.

During the coming weeks, please stop by to see the Sculpture Green grow as other significant creations are planted on the green in front of the patio.

When you visit again, please consider having lunch or dinner next door at the highly praised AKA Bistro.

Please note our extended hours: open until 9:00pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday as well as Sunday from 11:00 till 3:00pm.

James Aponovich 52 WEEKS / 52 PAINTINGS

Clark Gallery is honored to announce James Aponovich has set out on an unprecendented marathon. An internationally renowned painter, James will be devoting himself to completing one painting each week for the next 52 weeks. Please follow along on James' Blog at: APONOVICH 52, and join him on his remarkable journey. With each completed painting, James will post an entry with notes on his painstaking process enabling the viewer unequaled access to the thoughts, inspirations and work ethic of this important American painter.

Aponovich paints complex still life compositions, with a strong undercurrent of surrealism pervading the work. His exquisite paintings are distinguished by their geometry, proportion, composition and light filled atmosphere. Referencing 17th Century Dutch and Flemish still life painters, masters of the Renaissance, and the surreal compositional components of mid 20th century painters, Aponovich's paintings are technically astounding idealizations of reality.

James has a lengthy and illustrious exhibition history. His paintings and drawings are represented in museum collections across the country including: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the New Britain Museum of American Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Currier Museum of Art; the Arkansas Art Institute; the Portland Museum of Art, among others. Aponovich lives in New Hampshire, where he was bestowed the honorary designation as the State of New Hampshire's Artist Laureate.

With APONOVICH 52, James will be entering a new terrain for painters of his genre. With his strict conceptual time-based premise of completing one painting each week for one year, with the resulting 52 paintings becoming the subject of an exhibition at year's end, his painting methodolgy becomes part performance, part ritual and part obsession. In directing all his thought and efforts to completing a painting each week, APONOVICH 52 becomes a work of profound contemplation on art and the act of painting: transcendent,inspirational and visionary.

Please check in at APONOVICH 52 to see each painting unveiled every week. And please be sure to visit the exhibition in May of 2012.

Curatorial Flashbacks of Carl Belz

As long time admirers of the erudition and scholarship by an iconic figure in the world of art in the northeast and beyond, Clark Galley is delighted to bring the attention to members of the Boston art community, past and present, the insightful words of the esteemed Carl Belz, online at LEFT BANK ART BLOG.

Please join Carl, Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, as he recounts the challenging, joyful and poignant moments and events during his illustrious tenure at the helm of the Rose from 1974 - 1998. Mr. Belz's passion for the art (and the sports) of his time is unparalleled in the region. We encourage you to follow his CURATORIAL FLASHBACKS and remember an important chapter in the history of art in Boston, now gone, while recognizing how the present and the future emerge from the past, and our dedicated predecessors.

NEW Sculpture Green: Clark Gallery & AKA Bistro

Clark Gallery and AKA Bistro are pleased to announce the creation of a Sculpture Green directly across from the gallery and adjacent to AKA Bistro at Lincoln Station. After months of planning and working with the Lincoln community, we have installed Gary Haven Smith's elegant granite sculpture entitled Counterpoise. Weighing nearly two tons, Counterpoise measures 80" tall x 27" x 22" around. Gary arrived in Lincoln this week and, with the assistance of a crane, dropped the sculpture into place on the green. To see pictures of the installation please click HERE.

Gary carves elegant abstract sculptures out of granite boulders found near his home in New Hampshire. His work features textures, patterns, and designs inspired by ancient civilizations, symbols, and the geological past. Through his creative process, he explores the complex relationships between the natural environment, cultural history, and recent technology. As the artist describes the process:

I have been harvesting glacial boulders in New Hampshire. These boulders have a legacy for me. They are time capsules that have been rolled, tumbled, and abraded by glaciers as they have traveled on their journey. I use diamond embedded saws, a large granite wire saw, sandblasters, grinders, and carbide-tipped tools to cut, carve, and work the granite.

Gary's sculpture is based in an austere New England formalism, with an aesthetic that is both elemental and essential. He has been an important figure in New England sculpture for many years and his work can be found in many public and private collections and graces the grounds of both public spaces and private residences throughout the region.

Our goal is to create a meditative and engaging outdoor space for the community to celebrate and contemplate contemporary sculpture being created in New England.

Boston Globe and Shelley Reed

Clark Gallery is honored to announce Shelley Reed was featured in a recent review by Cate McQuaid in The Boston Globe.

Around the time Modernism crumpled into postmodernism in the second half of the 20th century, the idea that great artists make completely original works of art gave way to a recycling ethos. Artists began to plunder the art historical canon with heightened self-awareness and irony. The lush and uneasy “A Debt to Pleasure’’ at Montserrat College of Art Gallery delves into a particular vein of this type of work: gorgeous representational painting.

The exhibit, organized by gallery director Leonie Bradbury, emphasizes painting’s heft in the canon, the hallucinatory beauty it can evoke, and the medium’s role as a carrier of history, allegory, and symbolism. All the artists in this show are remarkable technicians, and their ability to evoke, say, 17th-century Dutch painting or 19th-century American folk art provokes both admiration and an unnerving sense of the gulf of time. What has changed? What hasn’t?

For instance, Shelley Reed’s “By the Well (after J. Weenix and d’Hondecoeter)’’ is based on the lush-hued “Flowers on a Fountain With a Peacock’’ (1700-10) by Jan Weenix and Melchior d’Hondecoeter, Dutch painters of hunting scenes and wildlife. At the center, a spread of glistening fruit sits below a fountain adorned with sculptures of two bored tots. Birds and other animals surround the scene. The overflowing still life was a common motif in Dutch painting then, which morally skewered overindulgence even as it visually reveled in it. Such themes are no less apt today. Reed’s black-and-white take on the scene drains it of the handy joys of color, and makes the scene stark and nightmarish.

Dawn Southworth and Paul Bowen in Wood Work

This exhibition includes the work of ten artists who use wood as medium and conceptual source. In an era when technology has altered the realm of art making as much as everything else in our lives, these artists celebrate that most ancient and primal of raw materials - wood. While the material is the unifying theme, each artist creates unique forms that draw their inspiration from the inherent beauty, natural qualities, and enduring power of wood. In many ways wood offers a corollary to the human body suggesting living, organic, sensuous form with trunks and limbs, heart and skin that is also subject to growth, change, and ultimately decay. -Elli Crocker, Curator

Shelley Reed: New Exhibitions

Clark Gallery is honored to congratulate Shelley Reedfor the inclusion of her large scale paintings in the exhibition A Debt to Pleasure, at the Montserrat Gallery at the Montserrat College of Art. In addition to Ms. Reed, this intriguing exhibition includes the work of Julie Heffernan, David Ording, Erik Thor Sandberg and Anne Siems. The exhibition runs from February 4 - April 7.

Beyond their flawlessly rendered surfaces, the paintings in A Debt to Pleasure integrate the sensual and the sinister, the vulgar and the mysterious. Each artist explicitly references stylistic techniques and aesthetics of the past to create a provocative body of work that explores meaning making in painting. In a decidedly postmodern manifestation, allegorical realism is employed to investigate symbolism in contemporary art, dissemination of cultural history and the continued obsession with 'everything new'. -Leonie Bradbury

Erica Daborn at Phillips Academy

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the photo drawings, by Erica Daborn, are the subject of a solo exhibition at the Gelb Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover, entitled: Starting from Somewhere Else.

Enlarged images found in photographic books from the 1940s and 1950s are the surfaces upon which Erica Daborn creates her densely layered drawings. Painting the bookplate to obliterate the original scene, Daborn scrapes and rubs away places to reveal traces of the underlying photograph. The uncovered imagery is then reinterpreted through the lines, smudges, drawings, and drips of ink, pencil, and graphite that Daborn applies. The found photograph and applied drawing uniquely interact, creating a visual stimulus with great depth and charged meaning.

Starting from Somewhere Else, will be on exhibit in the Gelb Gallery until March 10. The exhibit is free and open to the public on weekdays from 9 am to 5.

Please join Erica for a reception at Gelb Gallery on February 12, from 3-5pm. There will also be a gallery talk on Tuesday, February 22, at 8:00 pm.

Clark Gallery has an excellent selection of Erica's work in our inventory.

Photography as a medium has always been actively concerned with describing identity. While a portrait is typically an artistic representation of a person where verisimilitude is the goal, here the inquiry is questioned and expanded. Rather than employing a camera to create an objective document, the artists in this exhibition are often involved in constructing narrative sequences that pose questions with open-ended outcomes. As the exhibition's title suggests, photography has the power to imply, construct, and/or denya narrative. The photographs in the exhibition reflect facets of our ever-changing precepts about family, identity, truth and fiction.

Clark Gallery maintains an excellent inventory of Andy's work with a wide selection of images from his recent monograph Guardians, and from his Sentry and Art Fare series.

Cynthia Greig Mid-Career Survey

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the photographs of Cynthia Greig are the subject of a mid-career survey exhibition, spanning two decades, at the Oakland University Art Gallery, in Rochester, Michigan. The exhibition runs from January 7 - February 20, and is entitled Cynthia Greig: Subverting the (un)Conventional. The exhibition is accompanied by a 70 page full color catalog and was made possible by grants from the Kresge Foundation, the Michigan Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cynthia Greig makes photographs that explore the exchange of influence between perception and experience, and the photographs unique role in negotiating what we believe to be true. The artist uses the authority of photography to challenge conventions of image making about gender, identity and truth. Cynthia Greig: Subverting the (un)Conventional, includes photographs from several bodies of work including: Likeness of Being, Genetic Traits, Representations, Nature Morte, and Growth Gravity. This exhibition also reprises New Eden: The Life and Work of Isabelle Raymond, and includes an installation/reconstruction of a 19th century room containing some of Isabelle Raymond's photographs.

Cynthia Greig has shown her photographs nationally and internationally in numerous solo exhibitions most recently at the Clark Gallery in November, 2010, Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam, DNJ Gallery, Los Angeles, and the UNO Art Space, Stuttgart. Her work is represented in major collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Smith Museum of Art, the George Eastman House International Center for Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Coleçao Foto Arte/Arte 21, Brasilia.

Whitney Museum Acquires Richard Barnes

Ted Kaczynski, our home grown philosopher/terrorist, currently serving life in prison for crimes either committed out of dedication to a cause, or madness or both, had not only been extracted from his rural ramshackle home, but the home itself has been incarcerated. The cabin was shipped across the country to be used as evidence in his trial. Photographer Richard Barnes' work looks at historical and contemporary artifacts (in this case the cabin and its site), and using the imagery and methods of architecture /archaeology it attempts to bridge the gap between the banal and the extraordinary, the cult of celebrity and the seductiveness of the infamous. Barnes' series of photographs Unabomber has been exhibited widely and has become a compelling and iconic image of our times.

Chris Rauschenberg at Griffin Museum

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the photographs of Christopher Rauschenberg are the subject of a solo exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester. The exhibition entitled Marche Aux Puces runs from September 9 - November 7. His compelling photogrpahs made at the historic and famed flea markets of Paris, feature compositions of surreal proportions with assorted objects displayed in dramlike arrangements and dizzying juxtapositions of meaning.

Clark Gallery has an excellent inventory of Christopher Rauschenberg's photographs.

Richard Barnes & David Moore Review

Clark Gallery is pleased to announce The Boston Globe's Cate McQuaid has reviewed our current exhibition of photographs from Richard Barnes'Murmur series and David Moore's recent paintings and works on paper.

Distinctive Shapes -Cate McQuaid

I've always been a fan of David Moore's hand-painted striped paintings, which thrum with the energy of crowding, imperfect lines and contrasts of tone. His current work at Clark Gallery, inspired by a trip to Iceland, sports a glacial palette of glowing, icy blues and blacks To his stripes he adds arcs and large, quiet passages of color and occaional ragged edges that recall waves rippling or ice melting.

In Jokulsarlon IV, that rough line arches luminously above a passage of black, forming the bottom edge of a contemplative gray-blue area that winks with paler lines and curves. Black returns at the top, so that even the darker blue seems infused with light amid all that black.

Richard Barnes' black-and-white photographs make a surprisingly apt pairing with Moore's paintings. They appear at first as abstractions; black, sooty smudges against white skies. In fact, those smudges are flocks of starlings, creating their own choreography in the sky. In Murmur #4, the bird formation resembles an open Swiss army knife. Surely these distinctive shapes are the work of air currents, but they look as intentional as an artist's mark.

For more information on the exhibitions please visit our website at www.clarkgallery.com

Dave Jordano Featured in New York Times

Dave Jordano's current work-in-progress Prairieland is the featured subject in Lens. This online project of The New York Times, is a photography blog dedicated to presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. It seeks to highlight the best work in galleries, in museums, in books, other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; and on the Web.

Dave Jordano's series Prairieland offers a window into a place rooted in its own vernacular. At the same time, the series conveys the universal desire to mark one’s place in the world.

Amid struggling small towns and often barren landscapes, a melancholic optimism of the human spirit prevails. Stone lawn cherubs frolic beside plastic garbage cans. The Statue of Liberty reigns over a classic Camaro in a snowy Midwest expanse. The otherwise uninterrupted vastness of former grassland is marked by fence corners and bridges to nowhere.

These real-world observations are those of a photographer who spent three successful decades as an advertising photographer in Chicago. Now, in his retirement, Mr. Jordano is enjoying a second career as a fine-art documentarian. Employing the same rigorous dedication as in his ad work, he is free to wander the Prairie without agenda, searching for scenery both sublime and serious.

For Prairieland, Mr. Jordano spent hours traversing the state in search of telling examples of humanity’s intervention upon the landscape. After first reviewing his work, I imagined him as some cape-donning Prairie wanderer — a Willa Cather of photography, restlessly roaming the grasslands.

Mr. Jordano assures me that, while he is fairly innocuous, his subjects know he is definitely “not from their part of town” when he knocks on their screen doors. Cruising Illinois in his Acura TL — “a car seldom seen in rural Illinois” — gave him away almost every time.

He says he enjoys the chance encounters and connections he makes on these solitary road trips. The affection for his subject is palpable in his photographs. The result is a bittersweet portrait of hopes and dreams as they are played out upon the giant canvas of the Midwest Plains.

Richard Baker Featured in Print Magazine

Richard Baker's paintings are featured in the article The Painted Book by Peter Terzian for American Print magazine.‘Lately, a handful of well-read visual artists have turned to book design - specifically, the classic covers of the 20th century – as a source of raw material and inspiration..’ The article also features artists Simon Morley (UK),Duncan Hannah (US), Victoria Reichelt (AU)Leanne Shapton (US), Harland Miller (UK) & Roula Partheniou (Canada). To read the full text please visit: http://www.printmag.com/Article/The-Painted-Book#axzz0ycUphJTb

A few years ago, Richard Baker revisited some of the dog-eared paperbacks—by Celine, Gide, and Henry Miller, among others—he had loved in his youth. “Something about the way my life progressed,” he says, “the existential flavor of my twenties had somehow diminished.” No longer able to read them, he decided to paint them. In each of his book portraits, a secondhand store-quality edition from the 1960s or '70s is centered on a white plane and rendered with creases and coffee rings intact. Satiny, light-absorbing gouache makes the paintings “lush and deadpan at the same time,” he says.

For Baker, books are “pneumonic devices that recall whole periods of time.” His paintings are deeply nostalgic, and his viewers often describe, he says, “a sense of loss or a euphoric memory.” What began as a personal homage to his one-time favorites evolved into a communal project when friends began to suggest titles—the series now encompasses everything from a Signet paperback of Octopussy to a board book of Good Morning, Miffy. “I feel like a conduit,” he says, “allowing the social conversation to blossom in what books I’m painting.” Meanwhile, Baker’s portrait sitters—the actual books he uses as models—keep hanging around. “I thought I could get rid of them once I painted them, but I want to keep them even more.”

Arthur Simms Review in Sculpture Magazine

Clark Gallery is honored to announce a highly positive and celebratory review of Arthur Simms' exhibition in the September 2010 issue of Sculpture magazine.

Arthur Simms at Clark Gallery

At first encounter, the work of Arthur Simms—dump-picked components assembled in quirky ways looks like that of a self-taught artist. Further analysis changes our minds: frameworks, when used, are well constructed; there’s no flimsiness to how things are joined together; and bases, when there are any, are carpentered with skill. The give-away, though, is that Simms has a signature technique that not only renders each work coherent, but also unifies his entire body of work—two concerns that seldom occur to naive sculptors. Almost every piece is wrapped in a netting of binder’s twine, wire, or rope, a process that provides solidity, as well as mystery.

A native of Kingston, Jamaica, Simms moved to New York at the age of seven. He earned a BFA at Brooklyn College, then a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, worked for and was mentored by art dealers, and returned for an MFA. He now teaches at Brooklyn College. His childhood in a poor country, where people are ingenious about making do with whatever they have, inspires his sculpture. Rather than buying a cart, he remembers that people would cobble one together, even making the wheels. He made his own toys from sticks and scraps.

Simms began his career focused on two-dimensional art, but at Skowhegan, his work began to segue into the third dimension. He has not left flat work behind, yet it would appear that his true inclinations blossom in sculpture. Many pieces are built on wheels, often discarded skateboards, sometimes tricycles. Nineteen Forty-One begins with one of those toddler trikes devoid of pedals, but Simms has affixed a very small skateboard crosswise, negating the possibility of forward motion. A kind of mast with a rusty Tonka truck on top rises from the tricycle, lashed to a brass shell casing tied to some crude aluminum rods that mimic a dynamite detonator. Everything is wrapped in wire. Toy Horse features the kind of toy horse that bounces up an down and doesn’t go anywhere, adds a bicycle frame with its wheels placed sideways to the frame, front and back, and three more useless wheels horizontally on top, just under a child’s chair made of delaminating plywood. Simms uses the trick of wheels aimed at cross-purposes to each other more than once, implying both a migratory history and a stasis, a mired-downness. One might find further metaphor for this black artist in the fact that the sculptures are bound.

Simms’s pieces are lashed together with a fierce, no-nonsense firmness. He likes to join things like bottles neck-first, and light bulbs base-first, to a larger section; probably no other method than his many wrapped layers of stout wire would hold such a precarious junction. The energy of the process manifests itself at first glance and persists under close examination.

—Marty Carlock

Richard Barnes at Wesleyan University

The photographs of Richard Barnes are featured in the exhibition Connectivity Lost at Wesleyan University's Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. Connections between the systems that shape our existence are frayed, eroded, even gone. A major shift in our social environment has occurred, removing the direct and instinctual connection with our fellow man and environment. Points of interface, of systems coming together, are no longer seamless. Broader environmental and social implications ensue. We may have hundreds of “friends” on FaceBook, yet we are lonely; we have no idea of the origins of the foods we eat; a landscape of parking lots and big-box stores has supplanted agricultural land. This exhibition identifies a body of work based on this disconnect that addresses the ways we are estranged from each other and from the environment in which we live. Curatoed by Judith Fox, the exhibition includes artists working in painting, installation, video, prints, photography and mixed media including: Daniel Alcalá, Chris Ballantyne, Richard Barnes, Matthew Bryant, Brian Collier, Maria Hedlund, Jason Middlebrook, Matthew Moore and Lucy Jorge Orta.

Richard Barnes' series of photographs Murmur is the subject of a solo show at Clark Gallery during the month of September. The gallery has a significant portfolio of his work including images from his Animal Logic series and his Unabomber series.

Warner Friedman Review in ARTnews

Clark Gallery is honored to announce Warner Friedman's recent solo exhibiition in Connecticut received a highly positive and enthusiastic review in the Summer issue of ARTnews. Warner's paintings will be the subject of a solo show at Clark Gallery in October, 2010. We have an excellent selection of Warner Friedman's work in our inventory.

Warner Friedman

The painting The White Pine made for a dramatic introduction to Warner Friedman's trompe l'oeil landscapes. Rising to its full ten-foot height directly opposite the vaulting gallery entrance, the painting appeared to be titling sharply away from the viewer until a closer approach revealed the optical illusion created by a raked view on a shaped canvas.

Friedman, who trained as an engineer before enrolling in art at the Cooper Union, in 1957, frames each pristine, crisp New England landscape with elements of a built environment that reinforce a sense of place. In The White Pine, a minimalist Yankee porch - its columns alluding to the Federal era as well as to classical antiquity, which Friedman often quotes - engages witht he flattened view of a scraggly but upright evergreen and its surrounding terrain in a way that suggests unity and disharmony at once. This house, after all, could well have been built with pinewood felled from the former forestland.

Similar thoughts come to mind when taking in the artist's other framing devices: house corners, barnyard gates, seawall fretwork, cemetery fences, and rooftops. a storm-emptied beach is seen through an amputated section of a lifeguard station. These structural elements convey protection but also exclusion, shelter and segretation, cozy nearness and unsettling distance. These pictures embrace nature while controlling it; here are the refined geometries of a certain vision ultimately wanting to keep uncertainty at bay.

The monumental, monochrome stretches of Friedman's fragmented architecture are as finely painted as his realist scenery. They show abstraction seeking a place amid representation. Litle wonder that Friedman includes the names Lewitt and Mondrian on tombstones in the half-imaginary New England graveyard of Civilization.

To say that painter Frank Egloff works from photographs is an understatement. Egloff changes tones, fracturing and reconstructing pictures. He prods our tendency to take photographic reality as fact, asking painterly questions about surface, facture, color, and illusion.

Egloff’s expansive show at Clark Gallery includes a meaty selection of his explorations of work by photographers such as John Deakin, Man Ray, and Garry Winogrand. In “after William Klein, 1961 (Pachinko doorman, Tokyo),’’ he deconstructs the fashion and travel photographer. Klein is known for using motion blur, and here the right side of the frame is filled with the fuzzy, leering grin of a man mugging for the camera. On the left, a man with his back to us dominates a sidewalk. Egloff breaks the image down the middle with a change in tone — from underwater blue to bottle green, both monochromes, and colors that distance the viewer from the bustling, agitated scene.

Although Egloff usually works in monochromes, the garish, tongue-in-cheek “from Richelieu, 1989’’ has him punching up color. The source photo was a jewelry ad. Egloff’s version shows an elegant, aqua-skinned woman in an off-the-shoulder red wrap against a gray ground. She wears a choker that looks like woven strings of shells or wooden beads, a bland beige that pops against the blue skin.

Viewers often wonder if Egloff has used a transfer process to get these images on canvas (he doesn’t) — his re-creations are precise down to skin texture. But his most recent work is completely different, a line drawing made with a pigment marker. “Pollock’s car, 10:15 p.m., Saturday, August 11, 1956, Fireplace Road, the Springs, East Hampton, NY,’’ borrows from a photograph of the scene after Jackson Pollock died crashing his Oldsmobile convertible.

It distills the image of the overturned car beneath a tree in spare black and white. The crazy, splattering lines of the leaves above and the grass beneath the car hauntingly echo Pollock’s paintings, but bled of color and texture.

Egloff is still square in the middle of the intersection of photography and painting with this piece, but it’s a radical turn in a new, intriguing direction.

Shining light on sense of sacred

PROVIDENCE — Three things distinguish an odyssey from other journeys. It must be long, unpredictable, and have home as ultimate destination. Those qualities all apply to Linda Connor’s photographic career.

For more than three decades, that career has taken Connor to sites as diverse as the Himalayas, Angkor, Chartres, the Valley of the Kings, Machu Picchu, and the desert Southwest. What these otherwise-disparate locales share is a sense of the sacred. They “remain mysterious, in plain sight,’’ as Connor puts it; and her photographs of them are “an attempt to point toward the unfathomable and the unutterable.’’ The home she seeks — what her photographs aspire to — is that metaphorical place where the unfathomable may be plumbed, the unutterable spoken.

“Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor,’’ which runs at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art through Oct. 31, is about home in an additional way. Connor studied at RISD as an undergraduate with Harry Callahan.

The show consists of 69 black-and-white photographs. Connor uses a large-format view camera and makes 8-by-10-inch contact prints, which gives her photographs a very fine sense of detail. She exposes the negatives in her garden, using nothing more technologically elaborate than sunshine. Finally, Connor tones the prints with gold chloride. The result is a very distinctive look: dark, almost sepia tinged, yet with a distinct luminosity.

Light matters a great deal to Connor, even more than it does to most photographers (which is really saying something). The almost unnervingly beautiful “Moonrise, Clouds, & Star Trails, Lake Tsomoriri, Ladakh, India’’ is like a poem to light. Nearly a quarter of the photographs in “Odyssey’’ are from Ladakh, near the Tibetan border and a center of Buddhism. It’s clearly a touchstone for Connor.

For all her love of light, Connor is alert to the power of darkness visually. All the photographs in “Odyssey’’ have dark frames and mattes. The walls are dark, too — brown, almost to the point of purple. The effect isn’t at all gloomy. Rather, it lends the two galleries a sense of repose and gravity. These are not images to hurry past in search of famous faces or incongruous juxtapositions. Further encouraging contemplation is Connor’s putting wall labels at the end of each sequence of photographs, rather than with the individual image. Evocation, not explanation, is her aim.

Certain motifs recur throughout “Odyssey’’: trees, circles, entryways, stones. The delicate tracery in “O’hia, Hawaii, 1997’’ is as stark as rain on rock — unlike “Tree Decorated With Ceremonial Cloth, Bali, Indonesia, 1991,’’ which combines nature and culture, the organic and ceremonial, in a single startling image. The circles can be suspended from the ceiling of a Cairo mosque or be the oculus of a Turkish caravansary. No entryway is more striking than that in “Religious Festival, Phiyang Monastery, Ladakh, India, 2005.’’ It’s like a portal to another world. The stoniness of soil, structures, and hills in “Prayer Flag and Chortens, Ladakh, India, 1988’’ (a “chorten’’ is a kind of reliquary) sets off the otherworldliness of the flapping banner and the spirituality it represents.

So many of Connor’s photographs seem to stand outside of time. As if to underscore this transcendence of temporality, she intersperses a set of very different images throughout the show: photographs she has taken of 19th-century glass-plate negatives of stars from California’s Lick Observatory. The titles Connor uses are the dates when the original exposure was made: “April 16, 1893,’’ say, or “August 13, 1895.’’ They’re the intersection of time and eternity — or as close to eternity as the non-religious mind can come.

As the Lick astronomers were celestial cartographers, so is Connor a spiritual cartographer. Her photographs offer coordinates toward a geography of the soul. They limn an ecstasy beyond passion, an understanding beyond knowledge. Great as is their sense of place — those stones, that tree, there — even greater is their sense of something universal.

(A scheduling note: The RISD museum has one of the nation’s best university art collections. It’s certainly the most French: It shuts down for the month of August. If you can’t make it to Providence by the end of the month, you’ll have to wait for September or October.)

Linda Connor Exhibition at RISD Museum

Clark Gallery is honored to announce Linda Connoris the subject of a major retrospective exhibtion at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design Museum on Providence, RI. entitled: Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor. The exhibition runs from July 2 through Sunday October 31, 2010 (closed in August)

This artist-designed installation of 76 photographs presents more than 30 years of work created by Linda Connor, who has traveled the world in search of sacred spaces. Connor works with a large-format camera to capture the rich detail of her subjects with remarkable clarity. The resulting photographs, printed in the sunlight of her garden in direct contact with her 8 x 10 inch negatives, are toned with gold chloride to achieve warmth and luminosity. The photographs in the exhibition, which were made in the American Southwest, Egypt, India, Mexico, Nepal, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Turkey, explore sites steeped in the passage of time and resonant with spirituality. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

John Randall Nelson Review in ARTnews

Clark Gallery is honored to announce John Randall Nelson's recent solo exhibiition at Gebert Contemporary in Santa Fe received a highly positive and enthusiastic review in the Summer issue of ARTnews. We have an excellent selection of John's work in our inventory.

Seeing is Believing Review in Boston Globe

Our satellite exhibition Seeing is Believing, curated by Dana Salvo is the subject of a Mark Feeney Photography Review in the Boston Globe. The show features nine artists employing photography as a tool to trace the arc of different realities, memory and the various meanings associated with a sense of time, place or identity.

In matters of their perspective

Photographers serve realities differently

Part of what makes a painting a painting, regardless of whether it’s abstract or representational, is that when we see it we know it doesn’t present a slice of objective reality. Part of what makes a photograph a photograph, regardless of whether Walker Evans took it or a 6-year-old with a cellphone, is that we do assume it presents a slice of objective reality.

“Seeing Is Believing’’ wonders what happens when we don’t necessarily recognize a photograph as a photograph or when a photographer chooses subject matter that can turn reality and artifice inside out.

The show consists of the work of nine photographers. In the case of Cynthia Greig’s work and Pamela Ellis Hawkes’s, it’s reading that’s believing. Without explanatory texts, you’d swear Greig’s “Representation’’ series are drawings and Hawkes’s “Surrogate Reality’’ series are etchings. Greig takes everyday objects (books, stacked cups), paints them white, outlines them in charcoal, photographs them on color film, and prints the results. Hawkes arranges drawings or prints with three-dimensional objects on a table against a dark background. The pictures have a visual lushness that contrasts with the parched, Minimalist look of Greig’s work.

John Chervinsky uses dark backgrounds, too, for his quite-marvelous “Experiments in Perspective’’ series. These works are like mathematical equations made manifest, jokes that have theorems for punch lines. Placing a pair of blackboards at right angles to each other, he uses chalk lines and various common objects (a clock, a glass and pitcher, a light bulb) to create Euclidean still lifes that are at once elegant, austere, and playful.

Chervinsky wants us to see abstract reasoning. Jim Dow wants to alert us to the vagaries of space. He captures a Fenway Park that’s deserted and defiantly horizontal. The latter condition is much more striking than the absence of fans or players. After all, don’t we usually think of Fenway in vertical terms: light towers, the arc of a home run, the Green Monster’s height? Flatness is the defining characteristic of “Sign’’ and “Political Poster of Evita Peron, Buenos Aires.’’ Combining delicate, faded colors with the absence of depth, they could be Pompeian wall paintings. Conversely, “World’s Largest Holstein Cow, Near Salem, ND’’ (fiberglass, not flesh and blood) and “Red Apple Café, US 59 and 200, Mahomen, MN’’ are all about depth.

Yeats asked how can we know the dancer from the dance. Andy Freeberg, in his “Guardians’’ series, wonders how we can tell museum guard from museum art. The stillness of who sits in the chair can rival the stillness of what hangs on the wall. Or so it would seem in the Russian museums where Freeberg shot his very attractive color photographs. The attendant in “Statues of Antonius Pius, Youth and Caryatid, State Hermitage Museum’’ is herself a kind of living statue. Only the fact she’s in color, as opposed to marmoreal white, indicates her flesh-and-blood status.

The question of art and life also concerns Christopher Sims, albeit in a very different way. His “Theater of War’’ photographs show mock Iraqi and Afghan villages built as training facilities in the United States. Sims’s simple, straightforward approach allows the issue of art vs. reality to speak for itself.

Dave Jordano and Oscar Palacio also look at military environments. Jordano’s photographs of an abandoned Air Force base in Illinois have a vivid, very nearly unreal color. They show emptied rooms, littered with debris, their walls covered (or, rather, uncovered) with candy-bar-thick swatches of peeling paint. The sense of decay is so lush as to seem almost exhilarating. The gallery notes speak of the images as illustrating the decline of US power. Well, OK, sure, why not — but that seems like a bit of unnecessary heavy lifting. Seen just as arresting images of amazing spaces, Jordano’s pictures work just fine. The contrast between martial past and mundane present defines Palacio’s “History Re-Visited’’ series. There are three images from it here, all showing Gettysburg: the mouth of a cannon, a broken-down rail fence, and what looks to be a concrete tree stump. None is dilapidated, like Jordano’s rooms (not even the fence). Yet neither does any have a sense of grandeur and mystery.

For Thomas Birtwistle, seeing is examining. He takes an amusingly clinical approach to a very nonclinical subject, fairs in Maine. The produce in “Tomatoes, Union Fair,’’ he presents as if they were so many yellow and red jewels on white plastic trays (the poor man’s dark velvet). The ribbon-winning fruits and vegetables in “Exhibition Hall, Piscataquis Valley Fair’’ each get their own cubby in an open-sided cabinet. They could be scientific specimens on display. Except that, thanks to the way Birtwistle has shot them, scientific specimens don’t look this colorful or tasty.

Shelley Reed in New York

Clark Gallery is honored to announce that Boston based artist Shelley Reed is taking New York by storm. Currently, her work is the is featured in an important exhibition curated by April Gornick at the Danese Gallery. The group exhibition, Other as Animal, also includes work in all media by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Sally Gall, Diane Andrews Hall, Julie Heffernan, Catherine Howe, David Humphrey, Johan Simen, JIll Musnicki, John O'Reilly, Jean Pagliuso, Jane Rosen, Amy Ross, Shawn Spencer, Erik Swenson, Lucy Winton, and Daisy Youngblood. Ms. Reed's work is also the subject of a solo exhibition at Sears Peyton Gallery.

Central to Other as Animal is Ms. Reed's monumental oil on canvas, By the Pool (after Hondecoeter), 90 x 90 inches. Reed paints complex narratives rich in form, symbolism, and emotion. Referencing seventeenth century Dutch, French, and English paintings, Reed paints expressive mammals and birds harmoniously caught in fleeting moments of hostility, jealousy, and anxiety. Opulent arrangements of flowers spilling from urns and wrapped into garlands are complemented by a cornucopia of fruit laden tabletops. Reed contemporizes and makes these images her own by depicting the scenes in grisaille, rich in black, white, and gray tones. Choosing imagery that is visually dramatic and culturally relevant, Reed appropriates and reintroduces it to present themes of nature, power, aggression, and beauty, compelling issues to our contemporary culture.

Ms. Reed has been widely exhibited in museums throughout the country including the MFA, Boston, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago. She received the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2006, was awarded the Maud Morgan Prize from the MFA, Boston in 2005, and Berkshire Taconic Artists' Resource Trust Grant in 2005. Her work is included in many private and public collections.

Clark Gallery has an extensive inventory of Ms. Reed's work. Please visit www.clarkgallery.com for more information and to view additional images.

Kid's Art at Clark

Art galleries are not ordinarily thought of as a child’s domain. The stereotypical gallery is cold, sterile, quiet, and maybe even a bit snooty. But Lincoln’s Clark Gallery is proving that galleries can be warm, inviting, fun, and even kid-friendly.

Last Wednesday, gallery owners Dana Salvo and Dawn Southworth, along with Director Kristen Zeiser, opened their doors to 16 Lincoln children for an interactive art project. Since May, the gallery has hosted the afternoon workshops, called Kids Art at Clark, once a month on Wednesday early release days from Lincoln Public Schools.

“It’s a great way to build community,” Salvo said. “We’re trying to dispel the myths of galleries. Dawn and I and Kristen are open and friendly. Salvo said the workshops are also a way to introduce children to contemporary art at a young age. “This is the art of their time,” he said. “You want to get to them early — create these out-of-the-box thinkers.”

Each workshop begins with a discussion of the current shows on display at the gallery, followed by a mixed media art project based on the aesthetics and themes of the exhibit, Zeiser said. Last week, children created sculptures inspired by the works of mixed-media sculptor Arthur Simms. From Brooklyn, N.Y., via Jamaica, Simms uses a lot of found objects in his work, including skateboards, bottles, wire and scrap metal.

“They’re all symbols,” said Salvo, explaining that wheels may symbolize the way people move around in life, as Simms did from Jamaica to the United States. “What do they mean? It’s all for you to look at … it just goes to show, you can use anything in art.” Examining each piece carefully, children asked questions and shared their own theories about the symbolism of the unusual sculptures.

After a brief demonstration of the materials and tools they would be using, it was time to get to work. “You’ll have some artistic choices to make,” Southworth told her eager art students. “There are so many possibilities.” Children sorted through boxes filled with pieces of wood of all shapes, sizes, colors and textures, to find the perfect elements for their creations.

Avery MacLean, 10, said she picked mostly curvy pieces that could be overlapped on each other. Audrey Ory, 9, also aimed for three-dimensionality in her sculpture. “I picked a lot of swirls and then I picked some that are flatter so they can go under,” she said.

In addition to the variety of wooden materials, the young artists had the option of weaving string and twisting wires through and around their masterpieces. Adults assisted children with gluing and drilling, while others grabbed a pair of pliers to shape their wire.Using gold wire, Abigail Ory, 11, formed a flower that would grow out of her wooden sculpture.“I think the color complements the wood,” she said. “My sculpture is kind of simple, but slightly complicated. I think the flower will stand out.”By the end of the 90-minute workshop, each of the children had created a unique work of art — the beginnings of their very own home art gallery.

Kids Art at Clark workshops are held each month. For more information, contact Kristen Zeiser at 781-259-8303 or kristen@clarkgallery.com.

Andy Freeberg Review in Los Angeles Times

ON VIEW

Andy Freeberg's 'Guardians' at Kopeikin Gallery in West Hollywood

By David A. Keeps

His portraits capture the women guards who sit patiently next to great works of art of Russian museums.

They sit for long hours on sturdy, unforgiving chairs, wearing stoic expressions and sensible shoes. Beside them, on vividly colored walls, hang the art treasures of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin in Moscow. These babushkas are museum employees who, in dress and physical bearing, echo the art they protect in photographer Andy Freeberg's lush portrait series, "Guardians."

The show, a solo exhibition at the Kopeikin Gallery in West Hollywood, runs through Saturday.

"Andy's work is smart, funny and beautiful," says Christopher Rauschenberg, a board member of Photolucida, which published "Guardians" as a hardcover book. "Looking at the relationship between the art and the women who choose to work as guards, he addresses the meaning of culture, our relationship to our heritage and history and the role of art in preserving and enriching our lives across the generations."

There is also a more visceral side to the work, Rauschenberg adds. "Each of the images gives the feeling that one is watching a very satisfying play with no lines or action, but with great set design, casting and lighting."

The "Guardians" prints, many as large as 5 feet tall, have the pinpoint detail and rich color of portraits shot on film but were taken with available light and a hand-held 35-millimeter digital camera. "If I'd brought a large format camera, tripod and lights, they would have told me to get lost," Freeberg says.

Freeberg, a veteran photojournalist based in San Francisco, is making a stir in the fine art world. His subjects, the unsung staff at galleries and museums, appear in precisely composed and naturally lighted environments that have the dramatic feel of a set. Framed so as to draw you into the scene, Freeberg's often-deadpan slices of life raise questions about how we experience art.

In a 2006 series, "Sentry," an unnoticed Freeberg took candid shots of the imposing white cube reception areas at galleries in Chelsea, Manhattan's latest snooty art neighborhood. Looking closely behind these monolithic desks, one can just barely see the tops of employees' heads. "They were on their computers, connected to the whole world through technology, but they couldn't see real life -- me taking pictures -- in front of them," Freeberg says.

On a 2008 trip to St. Petersburg, Freeberg noticed that Russian museum guards wore their own clothes and sat close to the works on display. "You go to the museum to look at art, " he says, "but take half a step back and a living person becomes part of the experience, which fascinated me."

At the Hermitage, Freeberg recalls one guard who became a muse: "She was wearing a blue and white sweater and I thought, this is unbelievable, the pattern is almost the same as the tablecloth in the Matisse still life behind her." Another looked like Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring."

On two subsequent visits, he would discover the passion of these women, who earn around $200 a month and sometimes travel great distances to these jobs that give them great pleasure.

Through an interpreter, Freeberg gave his unposed subjects only one direction: Pay no attention to the man behind the camera.

"Life is interesting enough," says the photographer, who is drawn to the humor of human endeavors. "You don't have to stage it."

Andy Freeberg's Guardians is the subject of a solo exhibition at Clark Gallery through May 8.

Julia Zanes, Donald Saaf and the Bluebird Theater

The New Art Center in Newton is pleased to announce EXTRAORDINARY: Puppetry, Storytelling, & Spirit in its Main and Holzwasser Galleries. Visitors of all ages will be inspired by the extraordinary characters, puppets, worlds, and stories created from otherwise ordinary materials.

This exhibition features an interactive theatre marionette stage set by painters Donald Saaf and Julia Zanes performed by The Bluebird Theatre, a family puppet troupe with their two young sons, Isak and Olaf; Jeff Sias’s contemporary toy theatre along with miniature paper toy theatres and Indian shadow puppets from the Ballard Institute & Museum of Puppetry; mystical hand puppets and book illustrations by Ashley Bryan; larger-than-life paper-maché characters and printed graphics of the renowned Bread & Puppet Theatre.

Donald Saaf and Julia Zanes are painters living in Saxtons River, Vermont. Saaf’s paintings bring images of family and village town life alive, while Zanes’ work abounds with colorfully dense and layered fairytale-like scenes and images echoing abstracted, personal, dream-like narrations. As their paintings glow with color, texture, and pattern, so do their Bluebird Theatre performances which are written, designed, created, scored, and performed by the family in venues throughout New England. As if it has stepped out from one of their paintings, Saaf and Zanes will have a life-sized marionette stage set in the gallery, and their marionettes from past shows will also be on display. Visitors to the gallery will be able to use the stage set as a venue for performing work that is created in the interactive gallery spaces.

Please mark the date as The Bluebird Theatre will debut their performance entitled “From India to the Planet Mars” during the Puppet Festival Extravaganza on May 1 at the New Art Center.

EXTRAORDINARY Related Events:

Instant Puppet Pageant: Thursday, April 22, 6-7:30pmWorkshop for all ages with puppeteer Sara Peattie, Director of the Puppet Free Library, Boston. Come work with giant puppets to create an impromptu display and procession!

Puppet Festival Extravaganza: Saturday, May 1, 2-5pmA day of fun for families and all featuring the Donald Saaf & Julia Zanes family Bluebird Theatre and other performances. Create & act with puppets, storytellers, and more!

A Short Entertaining History of Toy Theatre: Wednesday, May 12, 7-9pmPresentation by Dr. John Bell, the singing professor, accompanied by Trudi Cohen on toy piano. Bell and Cohen are co-founders and current members of the NYC-based Great Small Works, a collective of artists who keep theatre at the heart of social life.

We have an extensive inventory of work by Juiia and Donald.

For more information on Extraordinary please visit www.newartcenter.org or call (617) 964-3424 to pre-register for any of these events.

Ilana Manolson in South Africa

Ilana Manolson is in Johanesburg, South Africa as a Visiting Artist in Residence at the Artists Proof Studio.

Founded by well-known printmaker Kim Berman and Nhlanhla Xaba, ARTIST PROOF STUDIO is a quality Art Education Centre that specializes in printmaking through a variety of diverse partnerships with creative young artists, established professional artists, community groups, patrons and funders. It was established in response to a call by Nelson Mandela to all South Africans to participate in the building of a new, democratic society that would promote reconciliation, cultural diversity, equality, and above all, a culture that celebrates human rights.

During the Residency, Ilana, along with colleagues Jane Goldman and Catherine Kernan, will be training Artist Proof graduate artists in specialized advanced printmaking techniques, as well as having an exhibition entitled Connected by Roots.

Through the Virtual Looking Glass

Martha Jane Bradford is featured in the important exhibition Through the Virtual Looking Glass:A Mixed Reality Exhibition of the Art of Virtual Worlds. The exhibition runs through April 30.

This April the Virtual Art Initiative and the Caerleon Sims in Second Life and OpenSim will host an exhibition of the art of virtual worlds in the real world at Harbor Gallery of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The Boston exhibition is part of an unprecedented international collaboration which will exhibit the work of artists from more than twenty nations simultaneously in real world galleries in six countries: Italy, France, Holland, Germany, Brazil, and the USA.

Virtual Worlds are computer generated, immersive, three-dimensional environments that allow people from around the globe to interact with one another through "avatars" (digital bodies) and to shape their environments, both individually and collectively, by using graphical and programming tools.

In process of development since the 1980s, virtual worlds now have more than 12 million participants, and include such venues as Second Life, OpenSim, VastPark, Blue Mars, and World of Warcraft. Virtual worlds are like photography, cinema, video, and electronic music were in their early years in that they provide the opportunity, in the form of a new technology, for radically innovative forms of aesthetic expression.

A "mixed reality" exhibition brings virtual art into real world spaces where it becomes accessible to wide audiences.

The Harbor Gallery exhibition will bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds through a variety of innovative methods, including digital projection of artworks from the virtual worlds Second Life and OpenSim with interfaces permitting real world audience interaction; images and machinimas (virtual world videos) shown on computer screens and in digital frames; prints of virtual artworks; physical sculptures and paintings inspired by virtual art, some with embedded electronic components; and musical performances occurring in the real world gallery space and streamed live into Second Life where they will be translated into avatar performances.

Grace DeGennaro at Saint Anselm College

Clark Gallery is honored to announce Grace DeGennaro is included in the important exhibition Mirare, at the Chapel Art Center at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH.

Miraremeans to admire or behold. This exhibition brings together three contemporary New England artists whose abstract works resonate with the simple human impulse to wonder. In additon to Ms. DeGennaro, the exhibition includes Thomas Driscoll and Meg Brown Payson.

The artists inspire the sensible articulation of fantasy and reality, through carefully structured semblances of form and pattern. Collectively, the works create an opportunity for investigating the livelihood of the mind and heart, challenging the ways we appreciate, or derive meaning from, a work of art.

The gallery has an extesive inventory of Ms. DeGennaro's work.

Tabitha Vevers at AIB at Lesley University

Clark Gallery is honored to announce Tabitha Vevers was featured in the exhibition A Celebration of 5 Boston and Cambridge Artists at the Art Instititute of Boston at Lesley University, located at the University Hall Gallery, 1815 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge.In addition to Ms. Vevers, the exhibition includes: Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, Rama Rejman, Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo and Christopher Watts.

Tabitha will be showing selections from two bodies of recent work: Eden and Value Added.

Tabitha Vevers received her B.A. from Yale University and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from The George & Helen Segal Foundation, Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the University of Rhode Island Visual Arts Sea Grant.

Linda Connor at Palm Springs Museum of Art

Clark Gallery is honored to announce, Odyssey, the important retrospective of Linda Connor's work is at the Palm Springs Museum of Art in California from 12.12.09 - 04.10.10. For information please visit the museum's website at: http://www.psmuseum.org/index.php

Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor

Imagery and technique are intimately linked in Connor's work. The photographer has always gravitated towards images that reveal "the essence of something, the apparition of a form or idea, rather than a particular fact." A large-format view camera allows her to achieve remarkable clarity; frequently using long exposures, the images can also present time and movement. Her prints are created by direct contact of the 8x10-inch negative onto printing-out paper, the image exposed and developed in her garden using sunlight. She then tones the prints with gold chloride. The results are extremely rich in detail and have a warmth and delicacy seldom found in standard photographic printing.

This remarkable exhibition of 96 photographs features work Connor produced from 1978 to 2008. During this time, Connor has sought out locales and traditions that convey the essence of time, faith, and place. Photography enables her to connect these concepts metaphorically to her subject matter. India, Indonesia, Turkey, Cambodia, Egypt, Tibet, Hawaii and the American Southwest are among the places she has photographed. Included in the exhibition are some of Connor's best-known images from the past three decades, along with more recent work that has had little public exposure. Accompanying the exhibition is Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, a monograph published by Chronicle Books in 2008. The book (hardcover, $50.00) will be available in the Museum Store throughout the run of the exhibition.

"We are thrilled to showcase these outstanding photographs," said Daniell Cornell, Deputy Director for Art and Senior Curator for the Palm Springs Art Museum. "Her photographs will appeal to a wide spectrum of people, affording a highly individual look at a diversity of cultures and locales. The most captivating element of the exhibition, however, is the timeless sense that these images seem to evoke. By presenting the photographs in tightly edited sequences, Connor actively encourages viewers to make associations and discover metaphorical threads throughout the exhibition."

About the Exhibition

Connor was involved in many aspects of creating the exhibition, including image selection and sequencing. By grouping the prints and not describing them with individual labels, she intentionally seeks to dislodge the viewer's sense of such "facts" as linear time, concrete place, and document in favor of a greater and ultimately ineffable sense of power and truth inherent in the image. The Palm Springs Art Museum is the only West Coast venue for this traveling exhibition. As a special addition to the Palm Springs presentation, a new body of larger format work is included.

About the Artist

After studying with revered American photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, Connor became a distinguished teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she has taught undergraduate and graduate students since 1969. Although her work has been widely exhibited and published, Odyssey is an especially comprehensive collection of work that spans thirty years of image making.

During the late 1990s Connor became the de facto artist in residence at the Lick Astronomical Observatory in San Jose, California. Here she explored a treasure trove of 19th/early 20th century glass negatives taken through what was, at the time, the world's largest telescope. She made prints using the sun printing process from some of those negatives, a number of which have been interwoven in her sequences to create a rich dialogue with her other images.

THE EXHIBITION TOUR IS ORGANIZED BY HAL FISCHER ASSOCIATES, SAN FRANCISCO.

THE PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM PRESENTATION IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION COUNCIL, HELENE GALEN, MARILYN PEARL AND ALAN LOESBERG, AND DAVID KNAUS.

Clark Gallery has an excellent selection of Ms. Connor's photographs.

ARTHUR SIMMS at ART BASEL

An Associated Press review of New Caribbean Art at Art Basel, Miami, ran nationally, featuring the work of Arthur Simms. Arthur’s participation at Art Basel followed his stunning solo show at Clark Gallery in November.

THE GLOBAL CARIBBEAN at ART BASEL

Hundreds of hours of shiny black cassette tape pour through a toothy shark jaw suspended from the ceiling in an untitled artwork by Bahamian artist Blue Curry.

This is not the Caribbean art tourists expect to find on their hotel walls or in gift shops.

A new exhibit showcasing Curry and 22 other Caribbean-born contemporary artists intends to expand the imagery associated with the archipelago of tropical islands between Florida and South America.

"It's real art based on very deep historical, psychological, social, economic upheavals and movements that make this region quite a fascinating one," he said.

The exhibit opened Friday as part of Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual four-day contemporary art fair that draws collectors to the Miami area. "The Global Caribbean" is being staged in a new cultural center in Miami's gritty Little Haiti district.

Caribbean contemporary artists are seldom seen in the international art market, and "The Global Caribbean" presents their work both to regional communities and to a wider audience, said officials from Culturesfrance, a French government agency whose initiatives in the islands led to the exhibit.

The 23 artists are linked by their Caribbean heritage — hailing from Cuba, Martinique, Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico — though many now live in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

The exhibit includes photography, paintings, sculptures and video installations. Duval-Carrie said each artist was selected to illustrate the region's diverse talents, connections and experiences with natural disasters, colonization and migration.

Some pieces clearly reference the legacy of slavery on Caribbean plantations. Faceless fabric dolls line up in an untitled installation by Alex Burke of Martinique. Colored pencils before the dolls appear to be oars, and the overall piece evokes a ship of stoic prisoners.

The metal wires binding scrap wood, beer bottles and cast-off wheels in two sculptures initially appear as simple nets catching ocean debris. But Jamaican-born Arthur Simms said each material in his two works has a specific meaning: hemp rope for the drugs associated with that island; glass and metal for the superstition in some black communities that reflected light wards off evil; wheels for constant migration throughout the Caribbean. The deceptively rough assembly of each piece is meant to suggest the handmade carts poor Jamaican vendors push to sell their wares in the market.

"It's about the diaspora, it's about me leaving Jamaica as a child, it's about the journey of the Africans coming to this hemisphere," Simms said.

Three canvas prints by Jamaican artist Charles Campbell swirl geometric shapes with knots, bloody hand prints and indistinguishable faces. Combined, the images appear to be a mass of people struggling with an oppression beyond the frame.

Some artists' Caribbean links aren't immediately apparent. Abstract fan shapes drip down the pastel canvases of Haitian-American painter Vickie Pierre. A series of black and white close-ups by Puerto Rican photographer Betty Rosado of a man's face, tattoo, chest hair and a prayer card pulled halfway from a pocket reveal his personality but nothing about Caribbean culture.

Hew Locke warns viewers not to assume that the politics underlying many Caribbean artists' works are always the politics of slavery and social class.

Locke, who grew up in Guyana, bound two adult-sized, seething figures with chains to a much larger horned figure between them in an installation titled "Kingdom of the Blind."

The work, about the control of power, was created in a post-9/11 context, influenced by the wars being fought by the U.S. and the U.K., where he lives, Locke said.

"Slavery is probably there, because being who I am as soon as I put chains on something it alludes to that, but the chains keep that power in," Locke said. "If these small figures are let off the leash, then who knows what could happen."

"The Global Caribbean" runs through March 30 and then travels to France.

LINDA POCHESCI at THE NOYES ART MUSEUM

LINDA POCHESCI at the NOYES MUSEUM OF ART

We are honored to announce the paintings of Linda Pochesci were included in the exhibition REALISM UNBOUND: CONTEMPORARY REPRESENTAIONAL ART IN NEW JERSEY.

Realistic, yet not completely true to life, this exhibition pushes the boundaries of representational painting. Renowned artists from the garden state present images of the real world in interior spaces as well as pure plein air landscape. The concept is further explored when the spaces begin to move, take alternate shapes and become transparent.

Ms. Pochesci’s work is included in our current Salon Show of gallery and invited artists and we have several of her works in our inventory.

Carlos Estevez: Images of Thought

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the work of Carlos Estevez is the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the UB Art Gallery at the University of Buffalo from Nov. 5 – Feb. 6, 2010. The exhibition, entitled: Carlos Estevez: Images of Thought represents his artistic practice during the years 1992-2009, and is accompanied by a new book entitled: Images of Thought: Philosophical Interpretations of Carlos Estevez’s Art, by the exhibition’s curator Dr. Jorge J.E. Gracia, SUNY Distinguished Professor (2009, SUNY Press).The gallery has an extensive inventory of Mr. Estevez’s work, please visit www.clarkgallery.com

Eleanor Miller Review in Chicago

The exhibitions of Eleanor Miller, Mark Bowles and Larry Chait at the newly opened Anne Loucks Gallery on Fulton Market Street, is a well put together, cohesively combining stylistically complementary artists. Larry Chaits' colorful digital photographs, large works that are perfectly framed in simple wood frames, are all based upon Midwestern, rural imagery like farmhouses, silos, and windmills. The images themselves are relatively sharp but the the background in all the pieces are blurred, effectively forcing the viewer to acknowledge the object image as paramount. This juxtaposition of background and object create a feeling of incorrigible movement which implies imminent destruction of these beautiful, once ornate structures that have fallen into neglect.

Mark Bowles minimalist oil paintings are simple stripped down renderings of the horizon. Although there is nothing captivating or new in these pieces, the bright colours used in all make it difficult not to appreciate the overall visual affect. All the pieces are large, most 20" x 30".

The strongest of the three artists is Eleanor Miller. Her large acrylic paintings are a delight to behold--all incorporate birds in flight surrounded by flowers and other elements of their natural (albeit modernly rendered) habitat. Miller employs a soft, serene earth-tone palate in all of the pieces. Stylistically the pieces are very modern despite the subject matter. This is mainly achieved through her adept ability of dripping and splashing the paint in a manner that is perfectly balanced between modern aesthetic and eco-fragility. The works are all moderately large, mainly 24" x 36".

We have an excellent inventory of Ms. Miller's paintings at the gallery.

Timothy Kadish at Alphonse Berber Gallery in LA

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the work of Timothy Kadish was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the esteemedAlphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley, California. The Alphonse Berber Gallery is located in a beautiful 7200 sq. ft. Julia Morgan-designed building across from the University of California. The gallery presents the work of dynamic, aggressively innovative emerging to mid-career contemporary artists. For information on the exhibition please visit http://alphonseberber.com/.

Timothy Kadish is the recent recipient of a prestigious Traveling Scholar Fellowship from the SMFA and his work was recently featured at the MFA Boston as part of the Traveling Scholars Exhibition.

Clark Gallery has an excellent selection of Mr. Kadish's work in our inventory and his first solo show at the gallery will be in January, 2010.

LINDA CONNOR'S NEW MONOGRAPH ODYSSEY

Clark Gallery is honored to announce the availability of signed first editions of Linda Connor’s new monograph entitled Odyssey. The gallery has an extensive inventory of Ms. Connor’s photographs.

Odyssey.The Photographs of Linda Connor.Photography by Linda Connor. Essay by William L. Fox, with an interview by Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin.Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2008. 176 pp., 135 tritone illustrations., 12x11".

Linda Connor’s world-renowned photographs are global and sublime. For thirty years she has created distinctively glowing, contemplative images of nature and religious sites around the world using a large-format camera and glassplate negatives. This career-spanning retrospective collects Connor’s haunting photos, including her renowned prints from century-old glass-plate astronomical negatives from Lick Observatory, contextualized by an unprecedented three-way conversation between Linda and two modern luminaries, Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. Published to coincide with a major touring exhibition, Odyssey is a long overdue celebration of a modern photographic master.Traveling exhibition Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connorwill be at the following venues:• Palm Springs Art Museum, December 12, 2009 - April 4, 2010• Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, July 2 - October 10, 2010 • Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona, November 20, 2010 - February 11, 2011 Exhibition tour by Hal Fischer Associates

Ms. Connor's work is in over 40 major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Ad the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has had over 70 one-person shows throughout the world since the late 1960s. In the last two decades, she has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant three times and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was born in 1944 and lives in Marin County, California. Since 1969, Ms. Connor has been a Professor in the Photography Department of the San Francisco Art Institute.

Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, monograph. Published by Chronicle Books, $50.00. Signed first editions available at the gallery.

Julie Levesque Exhibits in Wisconsin

Clark Galley is honored to announce sculptor Julie Levesque has constructed a site-specific installation for the Wriston Art Galleries at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

The heroic figure is created from white plaster, she is clothed in a cotton garment that has been soaked at the bottom with supersaturated salt water which is now dried and crystallized.

The top surface of the circular track is not solid, but is faced with semi-transparent overlapping screen. The screen is covered with coarse rock salt which has been parted as if the figure has been crawling around the circuit. The floor below the track is dusted with fine salt that appears to have been ground through the screen as her hands, knees, and feet drag along the surface.

“Sift” is an act of mythological repetition. Timed and timeless, it is the plodding, methodical representation of work – work of deliberate mindlessness. Head down, eyes closed, It is the refusal or inability to recognize the nature of the universe - that the journey many not be linear but cyclical.

The exhibition runs from March 14 – April 26. Julie will also deliver a lecture at the university and work with students.

Carlos Estevez

Clark Gallery is pleased to announce Carlos Estevez has been selected as a finalist for the 2009 Emilio Sanchez Award in the Visual Arts

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University and the Cintas Foundation has announced seven finalists for the coveted 2009 Cintas Foundation Emilio Sanchez Award in the Visual Arts: Tania Bruguera, Ivan Toth Depeña, Carlos Estevez, Carlos Ignacio Gonzalez-Lang, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Leyden Rodriguez- Casanova and Gladys Triana were chosen from a large field of applicants.

The award carries a $15,000 cash prize which is used by the winner to further his or her creative development. The award is generously funded by the Emilio Sanchez Foundation. In 2005, the Emilio Sanchez Foundation (www.emiliosanchezfoundation.org) endowed an award in the visual arts, in honor of the late Cuban artist and Cintas Fellow Emilio Sanchez (1989 - 1990). This will be the fifth such award in the series of five donated by the Emilio Sanchez Foundation. It was first awarded in 2005 to Christian Curiel, in 2006 to Glexis Novoa, in 2007 to Gean Moreno, and in 2008 to Ernesto Oroza.

The photographs will become part of the museum’s rich holdings in photography that span the history of the medium, from William Henry Fox Talbot, Edward Muybridge and other major photographers of the nineteenth century, to contemporary artists Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe. The earliest acquisitions were images by Luke Swank, Walker Evans, George Platt Lynes and László Moholy-Nagy purchased in 1933; photography became a regular part of the exhibition and acquisition program in the 1960s. The collection today consists of more than 5,700 photographic prints and gravures.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important art collections at an American liberal arts college, the Smith College Museum of Art holds nearly 25,000 works of art, with particular strength in 19th- and early 20th-century art. From its establishment in 1879 as a contemporary American collection, Smith's holdings have served as an important teaching tool as well as a significant public and scholarly resource.

Ilana Manolson

Clark Gallery is pleased to announce that following her successful one-person exhibition Observing the Overlooked, hosted at the gallery in March, Ilana Manolson has received a prestigious Artist's Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in the category of painting.

MCC Artist Fellowships provide direct assistance to Massachusetts artists, recognizing exceptional work and supporting the further development of their careers. This year, the MCC Fellowship program awarded 39 awards across a range of disciplines from a pool of 1800 applicants. These highly competitive awards also provide artists with recognition and affirmation from their peers and the public.

Ilana is presently painting in Ireland as an Artist-in-Residence with the Ballinglen Arts Foundation. The Foundation's programs are designed to support serious artists making important work in ideal, inspiring conditions while contributing to the life of local communities.

Clark Gallery has an excellent selection of Ilana's paintings and prints executed prior to her departure for Ireland. Please call or email with any questions regarding Ilana's new work.

Jim Dow & the Boston Celtics

If you are looking for legends, consider the Boston Celtics and Jim Dow.

The Green and White is home to some of the greatest players ever to play the game. The Celtics have celebrated 17 World Championships, have 31 Hall-of-Famers, and honor 22 retired numbers.

When it comes to Championships, no organization has won more titles than the 16-time World Champion Boston Celtics. Whether it's the Green's first title in 1957, their 12th in 1974, or the 16th in 1986, the Celtics tradition of winning championships has stood the test of time.

Jim Dow is an internationally acclaimed artist. His photographs are found in many museum, private, and corporate collections. They include the Art Institute of Chicago; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England. Dow has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New England Foundation for the Arts and has been the recipient of numerous grants.

Described as having the "grandeur and loneliness of ancient ruins," Dow's work has been cherished for documenting the disappearing uniqueness of America's playing fields and arenas. In Dow's view, the stadiums and ballparks of contemporary society are analogous to medieval cathedrals in being "a center of civic pride where people go to do some combination of worship and dream."

Among his many commissions, he has created photographs of the FleetCenter for the Boston Garden Corporation (1995/96). A version of the photograph, available at Clark Gallery, is on permanent display at the FleetCenter and at the New England Sports Museum.